There is rapidly growing interest in developing open source platforms and applications for use in cars. Last November, The Linux Foundation held its first-ever Automotive Linux Summit in Yokohama, Japan. "Linux has a competitive advantage in the automotive industry due to its ability to support the long-term support needs of automakers," said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation.

MapR today announced a comprehensive set of data connection options for Hadoop enabling a wide range of data import and export options to extend the ability to connect to data warehouses and applications such as Talend Open Studio, Pentaho Kettle and an OBDC driver. A summary of the announcement from MapR can be found here. MapR enables virtually any ODBC-enabled application to connect and access data within...

With the Big Data trend in full swing--where organizations of all sizes are using sophisticated tools to mine data and yield useful insights--Hadoop has emerged as a star application. From big organizations like eBay and Yahoo to smaller ones, Hadoop has become a remarkable open source success story and has given rise to a number of commercial companies that offer custom distributions of it.

Last year, I was slated to attend the first O'Reilly Strata Conference, but the 2011 Snowpocalypse intervened and said "no flights for you, St. Louis." Not only did I miss the inaugural Strata Conference, but it seems like I missed out on all the hype and irrational exuberance for big data as well.